Currently, many data sources, assessment standards and computational tools can be used to carry out GHG assessments with diverse procedures. They all have their strengths & weaknesses that provide relevant GHG evaluations for different context (e.g. specific production sector or country). The different results of these diverse procedures are, however, not easily comparable even if they describe the GHG emissions of the same activities from a company. Similar inconsistencies can also happen when a company is providing its GHG evaluation for consideration in an up-stream process but their chosen assessment procedure does not fit with the context of their customers. Experts and substantial resources are therefore needed to deal with these many existing options to provide consistent, trustworthy and comparable GHG assessments of value chains that fit with the diverse disclosing needs and specific context of various organisations.
The WISER consortium, with the financial support of the Swiss government, tackles this challenge by creating a digital ecosystem of open source Web services that aims at simplifying a consistent management of the many existing GHG assessment procedures with automated and auditable solutions that:
- Use and compare different data sources for various context (primary and industry average values).
- Adapt value chain models to different GHG assessment standards in a consistent manner.
- Connect various computational tools from different organizations with APIs to enable more useful and acurate evalutions.
- Bring the GHG information from environmental experts to businesses with "easy-to-use" Web services.
The WISER project has started at the beginning of 2022 and will continue until the end of 2025. In the summer of 2023, WISER will launch three prototypes to demonstrate the key advantages of using its digital ecosystem.